Chapter 9. Syntactic priming and individual preferences

Abstract

This paper analyses the relation between syntactic priming/persistence and individual preferences in the variation between the two forms of the Spanish past subjunctive (-ra vs -se). The analysis finds that the probability of repetition of one of these variants is governed by an interaction between individual preferences and the difference between self- and other-priming. Previous use of a variant by another speaker is more likely to lead to persistence than previous use by the current speaker in the case that the current speaker does not usually prefer usage of the variant in question. However, if the current speaker prefers usage of the variant in question, this situation is inverted. These findings suggest that for speakers who prefer usage of the primed variant, self-priming in corpus data might actually be more adequately explained as an effect of individual preferences.